ITraffic pressures Ridgeland

RIDGELAND — iTraffic had a problem, a “very petty situation,” according to the company’s chief executive, but a problem nonetheless.

In September, iTraffic CEO Nickey Maxey emailed Ridgeland town officials, an attorney and his business partner about a state inquiry into iTraffic’s photo-radar enforcement system on Interstate 95.

S.C. Court Administration, an arm of the Supreme Court chief justice, was concerned about how the system was being operated.

The Jasper County town had a full-time officer manning iTraffic’s system, but in the past month other officers had starting working there, too. These were under the direction of the police department but were paid directly by iTraffic as independent contractors.

Someone must have told state officials what was taking place on the rural, 7-mile strip of highway two hours south of Columbia.

“We believe that either the municipal judge or the clerk has informed the Court Administration of this method,” Maxey emailed on Sept. 15. “Otherwise they have no way of knowing what we are doing. So obviously we have an internal problem at the city.”

Maxey wanted his lawyer to approach Robert McCurdy, the Court Administration official who had contacted the town. Maxey instructed the attorney to “call Mr. McCurdy and do some fishing” and “see if he will tell you who called him and how this all occurred.”

McCurdy had told town officials that law enforcement had to deliver a traffic violation to a motorist within an hour of the offense. The state Legislature had passed a law a few months earlier with the 1-hour specification aimed preempting Ridgeland’s system. But attorneys perceived a loophole, leading to a new effort to ban cameras this year.

When asked Monday to address the contents of Maxey’s email, Ridgeland Town Administrator Jason Taylor said the town stopped the practice as soon as officials were aware of it.

“It smells of an officer taking money by the road. We killed it immediately,” Taylor said. “It’s not illegal. But I didn’t like the look of it.”

And the tickets, several hundred collected over two weekends, were destroyed.

PUSHING BACK

Emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act show it wasn’t the first time the contractor pushed its limits. The company repeatedly pressured town officials to go along with measures to boost the company’s profits and authority.

But town leaders say they stood their ground.

“The town is in control,” Ridgeland Mayor Gary Hodges said during an interview Thursday. “We run this program. We make the decisions based on accidents on our freeway.”

On that measure, the system is working.

From January through July of 2010, when there was no camera-cop system in place, the average monthly number of crashes was 7.86, and the average monthly fatalities was 0.71.

In August, when the camera and the RV with the officer and monitor was first employed along I-95, the average monthly number of crashes had dropped to 5.8. There have been no deaths since the system began.

A broken arm is the most serious injury recorded, Hodges said.

The moonlighting scenario wasn’t the only iTraffic effort the town leadership quashed.

Some have been specific operational methods, while others are ongoing.

For instance, the company doesn’t like it when town officials throw out tickets that have shaky evidence.

“They’d come in screaming and hollering saying, ‘These are good tickets,’” Taylor said in an interview Thursday.

“I’d say, no, they’re not.”

The town and the camera contractor are defending themselves against a federal class-action lawsuit, submitted in December. The suit lobs a host of allegations: The system violates civil rights. It undermines roadway safety. It serves as a profit generator for the town.

About 50 other communities operate similar operations, though unlike Ridgeland’s system, no law enforcement officer sits in front of a monitor observing violators.

LIKE ANY OTHER VENDOR?

Critics insist iTraffic determines who gets a ticket. Taylor and Hodges say that is patently false.

Evidence of speeding goes before at least two town law enforcement officers, a town clerk, and sometimes lands on Taylor’s desk, said the town administrator. Only after that may a speeding ticket emerge.

Of an average $133 penalty, the state receives 60 percent, and iTraffic and the town split the rest.

Hodges said iTraffic was like any of the countless vendors that want to do business with the town: They offer proposals to town officials and wait for the town to accept or reject them.

Pressed for examples of genuine tension with the contractor, Hodges and Taylor cited two proposals that were nipped: A so-called collection agreement, which would have allowed iTraffic to collect on delinquent citations; and the company’s request to circumvent the supposedly cumbersome state court management system, which allows the state judiciary to monitor every aspect of a traffic ticket.

But emails also show iTraffic repeatedly drew town officials’ attention to the need to maximize tickets.

“The trend is not good,” iTraffic chairman Bill Danzell wrote in an email to Taylor on Dec. 1.

“Our November deployed hours is about 26 percent lower than the 640 hours a month we subscribe to.”

On Monday, Hodges and Taylor declined to disclose when the system is being deployed, so as not to tip off motorists.

Despite the emails, Maxey says the town sets the system schedule.

Responding to a reporter’s questions Tuesday, the iTraffic CEO said it is not an iTraffic program, but a Ridgeland program run by the town’s police department, including specifics about hours of operation and locations of deployment.

“We merely provide services to assist the department in providing technology to maintain consistent enforcement,” he said in an email.

Has the company met any resistance from the town?

“We constantly try to improve our technology and the town does not always agree with us,” Maxey said.